The MarketingFile Blog

Telemarketing can be a dark horse in terms of ways to market your business. However, telemarketing can be a successful sales and marketing tool for your company.

Be prepared

There’s nothing worse than having a complete blank and a prolonged pause while you desperately try to think of something to say to your waiting customer. Before you start calling customers, make notes on things to talk about, and questions to ask that might reveal to them a need for your services. Once you’ve been doing telemarketing for a while you will also come to learn some of the objections you will come up against, such as “I’m not interested”, “I don’t have the money”, or “it’s not convenient to talk now” – arm yourself with positive responses to these negative objections that will move the sale forward.

What do you want from this call?

Is your objective to create awareness, generate a lead, or make a sale there and then? If your aim is to make a sale, we would also suggest having secondary goals, e.g. obtaining their email address to send them more information, arranging to speak to them another time, or finding out another contact it would be worth you speaking to. Smaller more achievable targets will help to keep spirits raised.

A good time to call

You need to think about who your prospects are and when they will be most receptive to your call. You need to analyse your target group a little closer to realise the right time to call this particular group. Don’t forget, if it’s inconvenient for them to take your call now, ask them when would be best to call back.

The most important 10 seconds

The first 10-15 seconds of your call are the most important – this is when you need to capture the recipient’s interest and keep them on the line. Consumers will tend to make their minds up after just three or four sentences from you – so make them count. Open with a friendly “Hello, how are you?” don’t jump straight in with a sales pitch or you’ll put them off immediately. Also make sure they are the key decision maker!

In layman’s terms?

Don’t confuse your customers with overly technical terms that only make sense to you because they’re thrown about your office every day – keep things plain and simple as customers won’t waste their time trying to understand.

Be natural

We can’t think of anything worse than being talked at by someone who is obviously reading from a script, and one they’re clearly bored with reading. Smile when you talk to customers and they will hear it in your voice. Remember to listen to your customers and have an actual conversation with them; they are people and not daily targets.

Have confidence

If you believe in your product or service and that it’s right for your customer, then they will also have confidence in it. Remember not to take a bad call personally, there could be several reasons why it went wrong. Stay calm and never argue – the customer is always right. All you can do is be as helpful and informative as possible – this would probably be a good time to arrange to call them another time or offer to send over an information pack.

Call logs

Keep a record of all your calls and make brief notes on how the conversations went and any dates to call back. With this information you can learn which approach you use is most successful and improve on it. You will also have at your fingertips helpful reminders for the next time you talk to a particular customer – you may talk to hundreds of customers in one day but they all want to feel unique and remembered, it won’t help your sale if you don’t remember who they are or the last conversation you had with them.

Take some of the work out of the call

It’s a good idea to send introductory or follow-up letters, product fliers or other marketing materials in conjunction with your telemarketing. This will help raise both brand awareness and a relationship between you and your prospects, as well as giving them something to refer back to after your call.

Get in touch with our team to find out more about our telemarketing prospect data and run your free count to find prospects for your next direct marketing campaign on 0845 345 7755.